The Hills are Alive: On Kiarostami's The Wind Will Carry Us

I’m not sure why I skipped The Wind Will Carry Us when I first went through Kiarostami’s films, but this is clearly a major work, a synthesis of the director’s career up through the end of the millennium and also one of his most elegantly constructed masterpieces. The general premise concerns a Tehranian film crew traveling to a remote town to document the locals’ mourning rituals. Operating under the guise of an engineer, the director waits around the village for a death that never happens, and the experience briefly opens him up to a spiritual, poetic wavelength.

The film opens by with an image of the engineer’s car driving through serpentine Iranian hills. Photographing his surroundings and making his way to the village, he befriends a young boy who guides him through the village’s labyrinthine earthen architecture. Kiarostami immediately sets up familiar themes. As with all of his films since 1989’s Homework, the mechanical apparatuses of the camera and the car stand in for entrenched sociopolitical hierarchies, a reminder of the physical and structural barriers that stand in the way of empathy.

Building on dualities of the city and the country, tradition and modernity, Kiarostami formally separates the engineer and the rest of the village to maximize a brief moment of connection later on. The engineer’s lodging is shot as proscenium (it’s so reminiscent of a pivotal image from Life, and Nothing More (1992) that it seems to anticipate a break in the diegesis), while the village is shot in densely layered overhead shots. His navigation of the village, which includes frequent detours to a hilltop cemetery to take work calls, is observed in static long shots, while the camera tracks the motion of the life around him, from the villagers, to nearby wildlife, in medium.

Kiarostami is intent on showing the beautiful, interconnected world the engineer ignores under the morbid guise of technological communication. The world that’s captured, of billowing wheat, verdant groves, and rich provincial humanity, is astonishing. Kiarostami finds images that feel miraculous in their serendipitous choreography. Narrative scenes of the engineer in conversation with locals are often punctuated by moments of wildlife rushing past the screen, and his willingness to divert attention from the characters to capture the extended motion of say, a rolling apple (somehow also a call back to the rolling can in Close Up?!), is suffused with a palpable lust for life. The lush tactility of the images, and the equal weight conferred on humans, landscape, and wildlife, gives The Wind Will Carry Us a distinctly mystical undertone.

The Wind Will Carry Us’ attempt to free the engineer from his own subjectivity becomes the film’s primary tension. Kiarostami’s work often feature a combative relationship with cinematic artifice, especially as it relates to his own directorial position. The meta-cinematic ruptures that define this golden age of his career represent an acknowledgment of a world unbound by his own perspective, a recognition that the immense poetry revealed onscreen is only fractionally as rich as the real world. The Wind Will Carry Us’ brilliance partially lies in its function as a feature-length version of one of these fissures without the complex narrative scaffolding.

The most informative scene in this respect gives the film its title. Following a young girl who has promised him a pot of milk, the engineer finds himself in the shrouded cave that houses the girl’s family cow. In this vaguely Apichatpong-ian space, relational divisions loosen and the engineer makes an advance on the girl, reciting a poem by poet-filmmaker Forugh Farrokhzad which croons that without the memory of each others’ touch, the couple might be carried away by the wind. Crucially, she rejects him, and even conceals her face, but this lunge towards connection, however discomfiting, is briefly transformative. When a man subsequently falls into a hole in the ground at the cemetery where the engineer takes his phone calls, the engineer transcends established boundaries by volunteering his car to nearby villagers. Riding on the back of a local’s motorcycle, the engineer is granted a brief communion with the cosmos in shots foregrounded by undulating vegetation.

The menacing effects of unwanted sexual advances and dictatorial power trips are a strangely under-discussed motif in Kiarostami’s work that are nonetheless intrinsic to the functionality of his humanism. Here, artistic transcendence is far from salvation for the morally-compromised engineer, who continues to shoot exotic images from the safety of his car. The film just grants him a glimpse into the mysteries of the universe. The Wind Will Carry Us evocatively suggests nirvana just out of reach, brushing against a humanist ideal we strive towards our entire lives. Maybe we would all be better off if we lost ourselves to the wind.

The Wind Will Carry Us is available on VOD